The year 2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. Founded in 1976 by Holocaust survivor and educator Theodore Zev Weiss and his wife Alice, HEFNU has grown into a diverse scholarly community, fostering regional, national, and international partnerships. Since its inception in November 1989, the Foundation’s biennial Lessons and Legacies conference has become the premier international forum for scholarly discussion and the exchange of cutting-edge research on the Holocaust.
The conference theme aims to open a comparative and integrated discussion of how the Holocaust can be understood as historically embedded yet universally relevant. Context could be interpreted, for example, as geographic, linguistic, temporal, discursive, socio-political, or metaphoric, while connections could imply relations across space and time from the micro to the macro. Continuities and discontinuities emphasize consistencies and shifts or ruptures, both latitudinally and longitudinally. At this moment of apparent (dis)continuity in academia and the wider world, we hope to create space for a range of discussions that advance Holocaust education and research, and connect it to the past, present, and future.
We invite proposals for individual papers, full panels, workshops, and seminars that address the broad themes of contexts, connections, and (dis)continuities as they relate to the Holocaust of European Jews, Roma, and other victim groups. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches and diverse methodological perspectives from scholars at all career stages and across all relevant fields. Because we aim to explore new ways of approaching the Holocaust, we ask that proposals focus on research that has not been presented at previous Lessons and Legacies conferences.
Submission Deadline: Monday, December 15, 2025.